Yaya's Story is a book about Yaya Harouna*,* a Songhay trader
originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book
about Paul Stoller--its author--an American anthropologist who found his
own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, language, profession, and
culture, these two men's lives couldn't be more different. But when they
were both threatened by a grave illness--cancer--those differences
evaporated, and the two were brought to profound existential
convergence, a deep camaraderie in the face of the most harrowing of
circumstances. Yaya's Story is that story.
Harouna and Stoller would meet in Harlem, at a bustling African market
where Harouna built a life as an African art trader and Stoller was
conducting research. Moving from Belayara in Niger to Silver Spring,
Maryland, and from the Peace Corps to fieldwork to New York, Stoller
recounts their separate lives and how the threat posed by cancer brought
them a new, profound, and shared sense of meaning. Combining memoir,
ethnography, and philosophy through a series of interconnected
narratives, he tells a story of remarkable friendship and the quest for
well-being. It's a story of difference and unity, of illness and health,
a lyrical reflection on human resiliency and the shoulders we lean on.
